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The board must fire Pichai. He has turned the most innovative company in the world into an ad business while ignoring its own inventions, which could have saved

The board must fire Pichai. He has turned the most innovative company in the world into an ad business while ignoring its own inventions, which could have saved it.

voisin 2y ago
lol. This is exactly what the board and shareholders wanted! Obsessed with earnings growth they killed their golden goose. Firing Pichai won’t change a culture built on an addiction to ads. Treat any business with an advertising business model as ephemeral - the business model simply begs to be disrupted.
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  What golden goose? Has any innovation outside of ads even turned a profit? My impression is that everything else that google does is some form of a loss leader. Or are you saying that ads are the golden goose?
  - voisin 2y ago
    Search was their golden goose spitting off ad revenue and in search for continuous growth they have left search ripe for disruption by an ad free competitor with better results.
goalieca 2y ago
Did Google make any money before ads by just innovating? I was around 20 years ago when all these companies were losing money. Twitter was a prime example of taking years to land on a business model. They all landed on ads. Consumers wouldn’t fund the company via subscription to cover the obscene engineering and operating costs. They would probably need to lean up the way X did and Google is starting to do anyways.
- 1oooqooq 2y ago
  google was the good exception. while everyone was just dialing ads to the max and turning into portals... google was at least churning new products and buying interesting ones to diversify ads. on their heyday they had some ads on search, some on youtube, some on apps, some on maps etc... now they've killed search by making it two page full of ads. they are in the process of killing youtube by showing more ads than daytime tv. and will soon show ads on android lock screen if this continues. but this started on the last year of Schmidt. when he gave up to Icahn and other zombies on the board.
  - exe34 2y ago
    > will soon show ads on android lock screen if this continues. not on mine, they won't.
prasadjoglekar 2y ago
In my living memory, Google has never NOT been an ad-company. They started with one exceptionally good product - search - and monetized it very well via ads. As the recent anti-trust lawsuits reveal, everything else Google has done since has been to leverage that dominance into other advertising businesses; specifically display ads and now video ads.
- drpossum 2y ago
  It was brief, but google did not sell ads from when they launched in 1998 until October 2000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google 1998 is not outside "living memory"
  - azinman2 2y ago
    I remember that time! Magical! I also remember the IPO. Didn’t have any money at the time, but still wish I had invested… or gotten my parents to invest.
  - ensignavenger 2y ago
    May well be outside the GP's living memory, though. Further, they weren't really making any money at that point.
  - Quothling 2y ago
    Didn't Google mostly live on VC money during that period? If they did I think it is probably fair to call Google out as having always been an advertising company. I think what made Google function for a long time after 2000 was the fact that they managed to keep their advertising business and their products fairly separate. The big downfall began when people like Ben Gomes lost to Venkataraman. Venkataraman who's now infamous for ruining both Yahoo and Google Search... But Venkataraman's recent "promotion" isn't exactly something that should bring us much hope though. Not considering that he's being replaced by an actual McKinsey spreadsheet.
    - drpossum 2y ago
nine_zeros 2y ago
> The board must fire Pichai. He has turned the most innovative company in the world into an ad business while ignoring its own inventions, which could have saved it. But the shareholders and board don't want to innovate. They don't want to maintain innovation. They really ONLY WANT TO EXTRACT returns. It is paradoxical. The theory of capitalism says that shareholders will want to maintain their golden goose right? Take care of their assets and property right? But turns out, public shareholders, large funds, and PE investors only want to maximize their return by sucking the life out of a profitable innovative business. Once they have sucked out enough, they move on to the next profitable venture to suck the life out of. This is the shape of today's capitalism. It is merely resource extraction. Google is an extremely well-built machine - built with thousands of the best engineers the world has ever seen, with the best products the world has ever seen. To shareholders, this is a giant blob of tasty juice to suck out of. After years of sucking the life out of it, now that there is an alternative to suck from - treasuries - they are asking Google execs to suck more, faster, or else they'll move on to suck the tax payers - treasuries. The shareholders and board absolutely want Pichai. They want a CEO who can cut benefits for shareholder returns.
- danudey 2y ago
  > This is the shape of today's capitalism. It is merely resource extraction. See also: almost every private equity acquisition we've seen in the last ten or twenty years.
kylec 2y ago
That's the trajectory of most businesses. A startup innovates, grows big, doubles down on what makes them profitable, and milks that as long as it can. It's very, very rare that a company will ever have multiple breakthrough hits, if they do it's usually from acquiring innovative startups (YouTube, Instagram, Oculus, etc).
dbreunig 2y ago
Pichai inherited one of the most difficult challenges: he had to figure out how to grow revenue right as search revenue was plateauing and money was becoming expensive, all against the headwinds of Google's culture. Your comment is a good example of the headwind: I can't think of another company where a greater share of its employees actively despised the industry that paid for them all to be there. Google's culture wasn't a problem – and maybe a good thing! – when you had a gigantic money printer working in the background, paying for everything. But it was there, ready to be a problem once times got tough.
- Malidir 2y ago
  Google were too risk averse with AI. Should never have led on LLM and not let OpenAI get so big
  - bananapub 2y ago
    google was leading on LLM, Search just (correctly) didn't want to tarnish their good name with the disaster that putting matrix-multiplied text generation on it would case. in a sense, google solved this by trashing it's own reputation, so it's not actually a "net" problem that it spews garbage on the result page now.
    - danudey 2y ago
      "We need to integrate generative AI into our search results." "But that will make the product objectively worse." "But it's what customers want." "Is it?" "It's what clueless investors want the customer to want." "Fair enough."
    - seanhunter 2y ago
      I don't think that's quite correct. I have my screenshot from years back when google was "correcting" your query so I asked google what year Marilyn Munroe shot JFK and it said 1962. I'm reasonably sure this is before the transformers paper.
  - krackers 2y ago

The board must fire Pichai. He has turned the most innovative company in the world into an ad business while ignoring its own inventions, which could have saved it.

voisin 2y ago

lol. This is exactly what the board and shareholders wanted! Obsessed with earnings growth they killed their golden goose. Firing Pichai won’t change a culture built on an addiction to ads. Treat any business with an advertising business model as ephemeral - the business model simply begs to be disrupted.

s1artibartfast 2y ago
What golden goose? Has any innovation outside of ads even turned a profit? My impression is that everything else that google does is some form of a loss leader. Or are you saying that ads are the golden goose?
- voisin 2y ago
  Search was their golden goose spitting off ad revenue and in search for continuous growth they have left search ripe for disruption by an ad free competitor with better results.

goalieca 2y ago

Did Google make any money before ads by just innovating? I was around 20 years ago when all these companies were losing money. Twitter was a prime example of taking years to land on a business model. They all landed on ads. Consumers wouldn’t fund the company via subscription to cover the obscene engineering and operating costs. They would probably need to lean up the way X did and Google is starting to do anyways.

1oooqooq 2y ago
google was the good exception. while everyone was just dialing ads to the max and turning into portals... google was at least churning new products and buying interesting ones to diversify ads. on their heyday they had some ads on search, some on youtube, some on apps, some on maps etc... now they've killed search by making it two page full of ads. they are in the process of killing youtube by showing more ads than daytime tv. and will soon show ads on android lock screen if this continues. but this started on the last year of Schmidt. when he gave up to Icahn and other zombies on the board.
- exe34 2y ago
  > will soon show ads on android lock screen if this continues. not on mine, they won't.

prasadjoglekar 2y ago

In my living memory, Google has never NOT been an ad-company. They started with one exceptionally good product - search - and monetized it very well via ads. As the recent anti-trust lawsuits reveal, everything else Google has done since has been to leverage that dominance into other advertising businesses; specifically display ads and now video ads.

drpossum 2y ago
It was brief, but google did not sell ads from when they launched in 1998 until October 2000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google 1998 is not outside "living memory"
- azinman2 2y ago
  I remember that time! Magical! I also remember the IPO. Didn’t have any money at the time, but still wish I had invested… or gotten my parents to invest.
- ensignavenger 2y ago
  May well be outside the GP's living memory, though. Further, they weren't really making any money at that point.
- Quothling 2y ago
  Didn't Google mostly live on VC money during that period? If they did I think it is probably fair to call Google out as having always been an advertising company. I think what made Google function for a long time after 2000 was the fact that they managed to keep their advertising business and their products fairly separate. The big downfall began when people like Ben Gomes lost to Venkataraman. Venkataraman who's now infamous for ruining both Yahoo and Google Search... But Venkataraman's recent "promotion" isn't exactly something that should bring us much hope though. Not considering that he's being replaced by an actual McKinsey spreadsheet.
  - drpossum 2y ago

nine_zeros 2y ago

> The board must fire Pichai. He has turned the most innovative company in the world into an ad business while ignoring its own inventions, which could have saved it. But the shareholders and board don't want to innovate. They don't want to maintain innovation. They really ONLY WANT TO EXTRACT returns. It is paradoxical. The theory of capitalism says that shareholders will want to maintain their golden goose right? Take care of their assets and property right? But turns out, public shareholders, large funds, and PE investors only want to maximize their return by sucking the life out of a profitable innovative business. Once they have sucked out enough, they move on to the next profitable venture to suck the life out of. This is the shape of today's capitalism. It is merely resource extraction. Google is an extremely well-built machine - built with thousands of the best engineers the world has ever seen, with the best products the world has ever seen. To shareholders, this is a giant blob of tasty juice to suck out of. After years of sucking the life out of it, now that there is an alternative to suck from - treasuries - they are asking Google execs to suck more, faster, or else they'll move on to suck the tax payers - treasuries. The shareholders and board absolutely want Pichai. They want a CEO who can cut benefits for shareholder returns.

danudey 2y ago
> This is the shape of today's capitalism. It is merely resource extraction. See also: almost every private equity acquisition we've seen in the last ten or twenty years.

kylec 2y ago

That's the trajectory of most businesses. A startup innovates, grows big, doubles down on what makes them profitable, and milks that as long as it can. It's very, very rare that a company will ever have multiple breakthrough hits, if they do it's usually from acquiring innovative startups (YouTube, Instagram, Oculus, etc).

dbreunig 2y ago

Pichai inherited one of the most difficult challenges: he had to figure out how to grow revenue right as search revenue was plateauing and money was becoming expensive, all against the headwinds of Google's culture. Your comment is a good example of the headwind: I can't think of another company where a greater share of its employees actively despised the industry that paid for them all to be there. Google's culture wasn't a problem – and maybe a good thing! – when you had a gigantic money printer working in the background, paying for everything. But it was there, ready to be a problem once times got tough.

Malidir 2y ago
Google were too risk averse with AI. Should never have led on LLM and not let OpenAI get so big
- bananapub 2y ago
  google was leading on LLM, Search just (correctly) didn't want to tarnish their good name with the disaster that putting matrix-multiplied text generation on it would case. in a sense, google solved this by trashing it's own reputation, so it's not actually a "net" problem that it spews garbage on the result page now.
  - danudey 2y ago
    "We need to integrate generative AI into our search results." "But that will make the product objectively worse." "But it's what customers want." "Is it?" "It's what clueless investors want the customer to want." "Fair enough."
  - seanhunter 2y ago
    I don't think that's quite correct. I have my screenshot from years back when google was "correcting" your query so I asked google what year Marilyn Munroe shot JFK and it said 1962. I'm reasonably sure this is before the transformers paper.
- krackers 2y ago